


A Welcome Comparison

by Just_Another_Day



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Confessions, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 16:17:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9333050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Just_Another_Day/pseuds/Just_Another_Day
Summary: For once, the unabridged truth is willingly shared inside the walls of Arles.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I nearly died of feelings when Laurent was insisting that Auguste was free of his family's taint, so here, have some of my headcanon. This contains canon-related references to incest and paedophilia, as well as slight spoilers for The Summer Palace.

Damen had initially viewed Arles as something of a labyrinth only because he'd been treated like a blind rat in a maze for the duration of his stay. Even after being granted complete freedom of movement around the palace upon his return as Laurent's equal, however, Damen found it difficult to keep track of the winding turns. With every solitary outing through the complex lower layers of the palace, Damen had pretty much even odds of getting himself lost. He even twice found himself utterly trapped in a dark room and then a hidden dead-ended offshoot, having to wait for a servant (and the second time, embarrassingly, Laurent himself) to come by and let him out. 

In that way, he supposed it was of a kind with Ios, with its twisting corridors and hidden passages that only a true native could hope to navigate with ease. Even had Damen's previous time in this place not been spent confined to only a few select locations, there was a difference between short-term occupation and the kind of ownership he and Laurent each claimed over their respective palaces. Laurent would know every hallway and room of his home down to the last stone, likely as a result of endless hours of childhood exploration. Damen imagined how the two brothers had probably made a game of it when Auguste could be spared from the duties of the heir apparent, much the same way he and Kastor had mapped the depths of Ios during boring winter afternoons. 

With Auguste gone, though, Damen wondered whether Laurent mightn't have been only person other than the occasional servant who had even laid eyes on some of the rooms in recent years.

Certainly the particular room Damen happened to stumble across that day, empty but for a prominently-displayed statue, seemed long untouched. 

Damen had been on the verge of admitting he was lost again, and the discovery of this place was an accident. He'd likely never have found it if he'd actually set out to do so. Nor would he have wanted to. He'd intended, if he ever come here at all, to do so not only with Laurent's knowledge and blessing, but with Laurent himself by Damen's side.

The supposed likeness of Auguste of Vere towered above even Damen's head. His stone face was rendered forever unapproachable and unamused. Damen understood what Laurent had meant when he'd claimed it was far from a perfect copy of the man, for that expression was surely the exact opposite of how dotingly he must have looked upon his beloved younger brother. This hardness instead reflected how he might have stared down an enemy prince like Damen, for all that Laurent seemed convinced they'd have been fast friends if given half a chance. Being confronted by this forbidding view of Auguste was unnerving, even for Damen. Perhaps that was why this place wasn't regularly frequented.

Though it was still odd, Damen considered, that this room should be underground and well away from the usual pathways of Veretian nobles in the first place. Auguste had represented a shining hope to his people, the embodiment of the starburst symbol. Damen would have expected his resting place to be all gilded surfaces bathed with beams of light, and for it to be treated with the utmost care and visited as a matter of course by all people of important who set foot in the palace. Instead, it looked like exactly what it was in truth: a mausoleum. 

There were no recent paths cut through the thick dust coating the floor, but Damen could picture the way Laurent by his own admission would have once spent hours in here. He'd have kneeled right there before the thick stones that entombed the only person he'd truly cared about, mourning his loss with nothing but an imperfect rendering cut by a stranger to support him through it. Youthful tears had probably seeped into the mortar between these very stones. It felt sacrilegious to stand here uninvited, witnessing what was undoubtedly the hidden core of Laurent.

"I wasn't completely candid with you at the palace outside Ios," Laurent said from behind him. "Perhaps because that place seemed too bright and airy to darken it with such things. I did used to come here, and often, just as I said then. But not for a while. In these last couple of years… I couldn't quite bring myself to cross this threshold anymore." 

He didn't sound angry to find Damen here, but Damen nonetheless wished he'd never unwittingly stumbled in here. What might have been a tender, sharing moment seemed now illicit, as if he'd snuck in here with some notorious purpose.

"I shouldn't be here," Damen admitted.

"You should," Laurent countered. "It's important. I always did mean for us to come here, even knowing how hard this moment would be."

"I'm sorry," said Damen, knowing the words were eternally inadequate.

"So am I," Laurent replied, though his voice was distant as if he'd barely heard Damen. "It was late in my seventeenth year when I stopped visiting this place. I was old enough by then that my agemates had all long since started clamouring for the use of their fathers' pets, or stableboys, or honestly anyone that would greet them with open thighs or mouths. I never felt that kind of urge. Not once. Despite the countless offers made to me and the weight of so much admiring attention that I could hardly ignore its existence, I was unmoved. I thought it strange, but it never occurred to me it might be some kind of defect until the whole court started commenting on what it could mean. Openly. _Graphically_."

Damen recalled the hateful words Govart and then later Aimeric had spewed. He knew what the popular gossip at that time must have involved.

Laurent stepped forward so he could reach out and trace a gentle hand reverently over the statue of his brother. "I believed them, at least partly, for quite some time. I was young, with no proper experience. And after letting my uncle touch me despite knowing that such things between family were wrong –" 

And here Damen longed to object to the idea of Laurent _letting_ that happen, as if at that age and in a moment of abject vulnerability he'd had any real choice in it, but he managed for once to hold his tongue, for he sensed Laurent needed to finish speaking. 

"– and with how everyone from the soldiers to the court to my uncle himself spoke about my obsession with my brother, I was so worried that something of my uncle's darkness must have dwelled in me as well. 

"Every time I as much as looked on Auguste's likeness in here, poor as it was, I felt this swell of pain and yearning and adoration like I'd never come close to experiencing for anyone else. It seemed in line with the way my books often described sexual desire and lost love. And I thought: they must be right about me. I must be some kind of monster, just like my uncle. I could barely imagine that something so strong and complicated could be purely familial. I didn't want to think it was true, and I certainly didn't give the smirking courtiers the satisfaction of knowing I doubted myself, but still, how could I have actually been sure? I personally had nothing to compare it with.

"And I worried that every time I came here and projected more of those feelings at him I was tainting Auguste's memory. So I stopped coming, and as much as I could bear to even stopped looking to his memory for strength. I _had_ to. No matter how much it hurt. Because Auguste didn't deserve to be dragged down into the muck with the rest of us."

Damen expected Laurent's expression to be shuttered when he turned around, but was surprised to find it tender.

"It took me years to be certain I was innocent of at least that one detestable crime. Thankfully, I have something to compare those feelings with now. I know the difference."

Damen's heart felt as if it were expanding painfully against the confines of his chest.

He could almost picture Laurent as he would have been at age fifteen or sixteen, coming to this room to voice long one-sided confessions not unlike this one, with no one to hear and the only response the dull echoing of his own words against the stones.

But Damen was here to listen now. 

You don't need to lock your heart away in a darkened tomb anymore, Damen thought.

He didn't feel the need to voice that out loud, however. Laurent had proven that was a lesson already learned.

The words he chose to share instead were the ones he knew Laurent actually needed to be told; that he'd needed to hear for far too long now. He perhaps didn't truly know the man well enough to speak for him, but it hardly mattered, for Damen couldn't imagine a world in which it wasn't true. 

"You found your strength elsewhere. Auguste would have been so proud of you," Damen assured Laurent.

Laurent, for once speechless, allowed himself to be folded into Damen's arms, and Damen felt Laurent's strength in the way he just this once let Damen hold him up.

The cold stone gaze of Auguste's statue still rested on them, as if judging, but Damen liked to think he would not in that moment have been deemed wanting.


End file.
